Despite the horror, we survivors were endowed with a will to survive. Or instinct. Or maybe it was faith.

You will never be pretty enough, skinny enough, smart enough, successful enough, or famous enough for the media

There was something awesome in the thought of the solitary mortal standing by the open window and summoning in from the gloom outside the spirits of the nether world.

A mind is a simulation that simulates itself.

The sinister, the terrible never deceive: the state in which they leave us is always one of enlightenment. And only this condition of vicious insight allows us a full grasp of the world, all things considered, just as a frigid melancholy grants us full possession of ourselves. We may hide from horror only in the heart of horror. (__he Medusa_)

The wild nature has a vast integrity to it. It means to establish one's territory, to find one's pack, to be in one's body with certainty and pride regardless of the body's gifts and limitations, to speak and act in one's own behalf, to be aware, alert, to draw on the innate feminine powers of intuition and sensing, to come into one's cycles, to find what one belongs to, to rise with dignity, to retain as much consciousness as possible. -Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With The Wolves, Singing Over The Bones, P10.